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Election screening in the US: live results
(CNN) – It doesn’t matter if Donald Trump or Joe Biden end up beating the state of Georgia in the 2020 presidential race, the state is already guaranteed to be the center of the political universe in early 2021.
With virtually every vote counted in the state, it now seems entirely possible that Georgia could host not one, but two (!) Senate elections in January. These are races that, if the numbers in the rest of the country hold up, will be positioned to decide which party controls the world’s largest deliberative body in the next two years.
How do we get here? Well, Georgia has a state law that if no candidate receives a simple majority of the vote in the November election, the two with the most votes advance to a runoff on January 5. Which is exactly what appears to have happened in the two state Senate seats.
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Senator Designated Kelly Loeffler (R) came in second to Democrat Raphael Warnock in the first race. It is a special election to fill the seat of retired Senator Johnny Isakson (R) until 2022. Neither candidate came close to 50% – there were several other serious candidates in the primaries of all parties – and they will meet in January.
In the other Senate race, incumbent Republican David Perdue appeared to have avoided a potential runoff against Democrat Jon Ossoff. It seemed that way during the first 36 hours after the polls closed. This, because his percentage of votes was slightly around 50%. But when the urban core around Atlanta (DeKalb County) began reporting its vote in larger numbers Thursday afternoon, Perdue was hovering around 50%, making a runoff look more likely.
Now consider Senate math in general.
So far, Democrats have won just one seat in the 2020 election. Democratic candidates won in Colorado and Arizona, but Senator Doug Jones (D) lost his seat in Alabama. Seats considered possible Democratic turns like Maine and Iowa did not materialize. And in North Carolina, Sen. Thom Tillis (R) continues to hold a narrow but stable lead over Democrat Cal Cunningham, although the winner of the race has yet to be announced.
If Biden ends up winning the presidency – which seems more likely than not at this point – the Democrats would need a net gain of three seats to win a majority. Which, if the map stayed the way it is now, would mean that if the Democrats won both rounds of Georgia, they would regain control of the Senate.
Could that happen? Of course it could. Is it the most likely outcome? To date, given what we have seen in terms of the unexpected strength of the Republican candidates in the Senate elections, this is not the case.
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But make no mistake: supporters (and donors) on both sides can do the math we just did.
Which means that they, too, know how much is at stake for the Senate (and the country) in Georgia in the coming months.
Which means millions and millions of dollars will be invested in both races. And both will be covered as mini presidential races by state and national media, as there will be no other elections out there.
Invalidating the two possible qualifiers is practically impossible at the moment due to the level of uncertainty in the presidential race, and in Georgia in particular.
If Biden ends up winning the state, and that’s certainly at least a possibility from now on, then Democrats may be energized heading into the runoff.
Or perhaps Republicans, who have long taken the state’s conservative lean for granted, will see the two possible Senate elections as an opportunity to reassert the state’s ideological lean.
Furthermore, with the amount of money and the attention (and scrutiny) of the national media that will fall on these four candidates, it is difficult to know who will flourish and who will wither.
What we do know for sure is that the 2020 elections, and the battle for a majority in the Senate, are far from over.
And Georgia is the next battlefield.
